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Wednesday, 14 August 2013

First I want to draw attention to how artificial our
church services are in a way.

We gather together for an hour a week, generally, in
order to worship God, carry out our liturgies, and celebrate the eucharist. And then we go out
back to our lives.

But we all recognise that God's call, and particularly
Christ's call in the Gospels, is a call about our whole lives. We are meant to
be first transformed by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, and then also
grow in holiness throughout our lives,
not just on a Sunday.

In fact God makes it very clear that the details of our
worship are irrelevant, almost worse than useless if we don't have love and
faith and sincerity in our hearts generally.

And sometimes what we do in church every week can seem
detached from how we live our lives, especially when we spend so much of our
time surrounded by people who aren't Christian and don't necessarily know or
understand anything about our faith.

Now, to be honest, this s already quite a common topic
for Christians. I'm sure we've all sat
through at least one sermon about not just being Sunday Christians, or
Christians for one hour each week. But
I'm just going to share some thoughts about it that I've found useful.

Today in many churches,
whether Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican,
Methodist, URC
the basic service can be divided into two main sections: The Liturgy of the
Word, and the Liturgy of the Sacrament. Basically the first is based around offering prayers, reading the Bible,
and discussing it in a Sermon, which is taken from the traditional Jewish
Synagogue service (which was based around the Torah).

The Second is based around Eucharist, re-creating the
last Supper as Jesus commanded "Do this as often as you eat and drink it
in remembrance of me".

In more Protestant
churches there has generally been an emphasis on the first part, preaching the
Word, in more Catholic and Orthodox churches over the centuries there has been
a growing emphasis on the 2nd part: The
Eucharist.

What is clear is that this basic form comes from the earliest days of the Church. The quote below is from Justin Martyr, one of the earliest of the Church fathers, writing only 70 years or so after the writing of last of the New Testament books, and giving a description that must be familiar to any Christian today.

The two main
differences is that this describes a relatively simple structure compared to
some liturgies today, and that it obviously dates from a time when there was no
set liturgy or text for the service. This came later, when instead of relying
on the president to make up the prayers set texts were given both to give the
‘best’ prayers, to ensure that correct doctrine (Ortho-doxy in Greek) was
taught and just to save the presiding person from always having to come up with
something.

Fundamentally, though, this is the same structure we all use
today and reflects the essential features of Christian worship and community.

Historically what happened to the liturgy/service was a
steady trend of making the central communion service more and more elaborate
and mystical, with embellishments and more prayers and sections, until the time
of the Reformation, when in reformation churches steps were taken to simplify
it.

In some churches
such as among the Quakers this led to totally abandoning formal, structured
worship or liturgy, and in evangelical churches it led to a dramatically
reduced form of liturgy.

In the Catholic church it led to one stable form of the
Mass being adopted that endured for 500 years from the 1580's before it was simplifed slightly (and
translated out of Latin) following the 2nd Vatican Council In 1960's.

What is astonishing to me though is how
similar the liturgies and services still are, not just in general structure but
right down to individual bits of vocabulary.
Below are selections from the current Anglican common worship, and a
translation of the Latin Mass set in 1580, itself derived directly from forms
of the Medieval Catholic Mass.

Services in Western Christianity (Catholic, Anglican,
Methodist, Lutheran etc) contain a very similar basic structure dating back to
the medieval Catholic service containing many or all of the elements I list below, and at least many of these should be familiar to any Catholic,
Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran and many other western Christians.

Eastern Orthodox churches are slightly different and
date back even earlier, but contain most of these same features in a slightly
less instantly recognisable form.

Some more protestant services have a considerably more
simple structure, especially if they don't necessarily involve communion.

A common evangelical approach is known affectionately as
the Sandwich:
'Worship'-Prayers/testimony-Sermon done.

Some evangelicals at least claim that they don't like liturgy, they say it's boring and fake and meaningless, but what they generally mean is they prefer a minimalistic liturgy. But the evangelical churches I've been toare definitely using a liturgy of a type even if they don't know it. Whether it's a better or worse liturgy is a very good question. And it can be just as boring and repetitive as any full Catholic-orthodox traditional liturgy.

But the evangelicals do have a good point, I don't think there is any point to church services or liturgy if we are just mumbling through the words every week, or just sitting there feeling bored, however complex or simple our liturgy may be. There is very little to be gained whatever form we use if it is not helping us grow in holiness throughout the week and the year and over our whole lives.

(Slight disclaimer: ‘catholic’ Christians such as myself who believe in the Real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist believe there is a real spiritual, blessed benefit to taking that Eucharist more or less regardless of what else we get from the service. I think what I say here is still strongly relevant in addition to that value though).

Some
bits of the liturgy just don't seem to make much sense as we commonly perform
them. My favourite example is the confession, which sounds a bit like this:

Now certainly in
churches I have visited this is read out by the priest and then there is a two
second delay before he pronounces God’s forgiveness for our sins. Now I don’t
know about you but I need more time than that to confess my sins for the week. In fact I’ve usually only got to about Monday
lunchtime.

And that’s not
the only thing. If we really, truly
confessed our sins, in full realisation of what that meant, of Jesus’ sacrifice
for us, the Love of God, and the darkness of sin then we would only ever need
to confess them once and never again.
And again, I don’t know about you but I find myself coming back week
after week and confessing more or less the same sins.

So what is the
point of this? Is it just bad, lazy
religion?

I think the answer is no. I do really value the
liturgy and structure to our services, I really think that there is a lot that
is really beautiful and valuable in these bits of liturgy that have come down
to us and have been treasured by centuries of Christians.

So I want to try to think of how we can think about our
liturgies and services to make them useful to our whole lives:

And my idea is basically this: Our services and liturgies offer us a model in concentrated form of what we should be trying to think about and follow for the rest of our week.They don't do the job on their own, though they are particularly valuable as you are doing them.But their main value is in acting as a model of spiritual discipline and the things we should be thinking about all the way through the week. In order to help us reflect on those ideas and grow in holiness.